A.M. Homes on forgiveness, hope and change

Posted by Trisha on September 27, 2012

Today is your first chance to pick up A.M. Homes' new novel, May We Be Forgiven. And that's something you want to do! In a fall filled with fiction heavyweights (including the new J.K. Rowling, which also goes on sale today), Forgiven holds its own, keeping the reader glued to the pages as the darkly humorous and oddly hopeful tale of Harold Silver unfolds.

Homes is brilliant at depicting the absurdity of modern life—and then turning it up 10 notches, without losing the emotional resonance that a good novel needs. We asked her about the significance of forgiveness and what she means by the title in an email Q&A:

Redemption is a concept that appears very early in the novel, but doesn’t become realized until the very end. From whom do you think Harry—or for that matter anybody—is seeking forgiveness? How do we know when we have, in fact, been forgiven?

That’s a very good question, and I’ll answer it by saying that in the Jewish religion every year at Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—we fast and ask for forgiveness. We begin by saying, “ For the sin we committed before you”—by being ignorant—or for the sin of envy or speaking poorly about others. We literally beat our breast and go over a litany of possible sins and whether or not we have committed them and we ask to be forgiven.

I find it deeply satisfying to confess, even for things I have not done—to repent for ideas, to repent for transgressions of the mind—to raise the bar for the coming year and hope to do better.

Importantly it is also at this time that we forgive others—as much as we ask for forgiveness for ourselves.

OK, so I’m getting a bit lofty here, but the idea is that we should accept responsibility for our transgressions and importantly go beyond that and make an effort to do better in the future.